Commonwealth Thinks The Future Of Banks Is Internet Banking

The Commonwealth bank is putting a lot of time and effort into dragging banking into the 21st century. Its most recent idea? A wall of Macs and iPads to offer Internet banking to customers within the branch.

Gus over at Lifehacker spent yesterday up in Brisbane checking out the bank's shiny new Queen Street flagship store. In addition to a concierge service who directs customers to the most appropriate section of the branch, the bank has also installed a wall of about 10 iMacs running Windows, plus iPads and iPod Touches, so people can do their internet banking within the branch.

Aside from the obvious question marks around security (which I'm sure the bank has looked at closely, but would still make me wary of logging in), the most obvious question is why customers would bother travelling all the way into a branch to do their banking online when they could just do it from the comfort of their own homes or smartphones?

Sure, there's going to be an educational element of trying to teach the non-tech savvy how to do their banking online, but is that worth have almost a dozen computers, plus half a dozen iDevices set up in a branch? What do you think?

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